Thursday, November 24, 2011

While my friends in the US are enjoying their lovely Turkey/Thanksgiving dinner, I have made myself useful today and created an overview of a typical cloud stack evolution. What better case study to use then Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services evolution

Let's walk through the evolution step by step:

AWS started with the basic building blocks used by applications: compute (EC2), storage (S3) and network/communication (SQS).

Interestingly, the next step is really to enable monetizing the solution. Amazon is of course already making money from the basic services. However FPS (Flexible Payments) provide an incentive for 3rd parties to contribute machine images (AMI's) into the ecosystem, and make some money from them. I believe this has been one of the motivating factors for companies with commercial solutions (think Oracle, IBM) to get on-board.

Climbing up the stack, an alternative data or storage service is added: Simple DB. This a great alternative for S3 if you're not storing multi-megabyte files.

Elastic IP Addresses, Elastic Block Storage and CloudFront are added to optimize the current offerings. Better accessibility from the Internet, more manageable storage mechanisms for host instances and optimized content serving.

By this time, Google released its Google AppEngine (for python). Developers with zero knowledge of infrastructure components can now quickly deploy applications ("in the cloud" ;-)

The next set of AWS services are really getting the environment ready to move into the PaaS arena: more automation and more dynamics.

CloudWatch provides insight into the infrastructure and allows us to take action based on metrics

Elastic Load Balancer integrates and automates the load balancing process, which developers previously had to run within a virtual machine (using Apache/Nginx/..)

Auto Scaling allows for auto-provisioning of components based on certain metrics.

Next up is a service I'm sure lots of enterprises had been asking for: Virtual Private Cloud. This will allow you to hook up your private data center with AWS services, effectively creating a hybrid infrastructure

Relational database services get added

A major step towards a complete application platform is CloudFormation. It's now possible to define an entire application environment and have it be automatically provisioned as one logical service

DNS services are added through Route 53, which provides a convenient way to manage domain names and how they're mapped to IP addresses (or applications)

That last feature can almost be considered the last mile before we can get to BeanStalk. With BeanStalk developers can literally provide a deployment unit and the service will spit out a URL at which your application is available. There's of course a huge amount of magic happening behind the scenes.

I took Amazon 5 year to deliver PaaS, and they've been leading the way for most of that time. So I cringe when I hear people talk about PaaS as if it's something that can be unboxed, installed and be done with it.